Tuesday, December 31, 2013

The Indore Bench of the MP
High Court by its judgment of October last effectively demolished the BRTS of
the city by allowing the use of the corridor by four- wheelers. It, later,
further modified its order by directing that while in the corridor no vehicle
would be permitted to overtake another. Thus a facility built up at great cost
to promote and popularise public transport for economic and environmental
reasons was given a severe jolt by none other than the country’s judiciary. The
administration has reportedly gone in appeal to the Apex Court.

As in Delhi, there was hue
and cry in Indore on account of the restricted space made available for the
mixed traffic after demarcation of road-space for the BRTS corridor. Not only
there were frequent jams, there were also frequent accidents, often fatal. The
commuters were increasingly becoming frustrated as their commutes took
progressively longer time. The prolonged delay in construction, implementation
and making available adequate number of buses also helped in stoking people’s
rage and dissatisfaction with the whole concept. Eventually, a social activist
filed a Public Interest Litigation petition in the Indore Bench of the MP High
Court which yielded the decision under reference.

Though conceptually
speaking, BRTS as a system of mass mobility is supposed to be flexible taking
in its stride varied permutations and combinations, yet the decision of the
Court did not seem to have helped in Indore. Even after the order of the court
chaos, according to reports, reigned supreme in the corridor. From four
wheelers to two wheelers to occasional bullock carts were seen using the
corridor. Obviously, it is free-for-all and the traffic in Indore being what it
is – unruly, undisciplined and rash – accidents have occurred with unmitigated
frequency.

Introduction of any new
system always has some teething troubles unless it is so well and meticulously
planned that all its elements are tied together to a T to enable its faultless
performance from day one. In our country if that has not been possible in most
projects implemented by the central or state governments, the question of

Bhopal BRTS corridor

precision planning by the incompetent and inadequately provided municipal
corporations wouldn’t arise. Both the BRTS systems in MP, for reasons best
known to the government, were allowed to be implemented by the respective
municipal corporations without any supervision and monitoring. This was a major
lapse on the part of the government especially when very large sums of moneys
were involved in creation of physical assets that are expected to yield in the
future economic and environmental benefits apart from easing the daily travail
of commuters of the state’s two major urban centres.

Not only creation of the
corridor was mismanaged, no effort was ever made to manage the traffic. When
the Indore corridor was commissioned effort should have been to manage,
supervise and guide the commuters at least for some time if not for ever.
Having seen them in action we all know how the Indore drivers behave. It is not
their fault really as the traffic wing of the Police has left them to their own
devices. They were never insisted upon to know the traffic rules and they were
hardly ever checked as to whether they were observing the rules of the roads.
Most of the drivers either do not know or ignore the rules of accessing a main
road, negotiating a round-about or even going past a zebra crossing with people
on it. Penalties for breaches are negligible and are generally determined by a
populist political dispensation. The pivotal role of traffic management was
somehow lost sight of and the traffic administration on the roads has been
conspicuous by its absence both in Bhopal and Indore. No wonder there is a
free-for-all.

One of the judges of the
Bench stated in a television interview that BRTS has failed wherever it was
introduced in India. He asserted quite erroneously that it had failed even

Ahmedabad BRTS corridor

in
Ahmedabad. Perhaps, he was misinformed as the Ahmedabad BRTS has fetched kudos
even abroad and representatives of a few governments from Africa and South-East
Asia came to look at this success story. Unfortunately what succeeds elsewhere
does not generally succeed in India, much less in Madhya Pradesh. The reason
seems to be that while there is a penchant to act in breach of rules the
governance is awfully weak.

What the High Court has done is to throw out
the baby with the bathwater. Instead of prescribing stiffer management of
traffic its decision has rendered a facility created at great cost to public
exchequer utterly redundant forgetting that in the short term there was
likelihood of inconveniences but in the long term BRTS would have been of great
benefit to all its users in our ever-enlarging cities. Besides, the court also
seems to have lost sight of the fact that in India the rationale of introducing
BRTS was to nudge four and two-wheeler users towards public transport in order
not only to curb the mounting import bill on oil but also curb the rising
carbon emissions of the country.

It is, therefore,
necessary for the administration to enforce strict traffic management to ensure
functioning of the BRTS just as it was conceived for the benefit of a vast
section of the population that is dependent on public transport for easy
mobility and speedy commutes. At the risk of repetition, one has to mention
that strict traffic management in both, the mixed lanes and in the corridor is
of the essence. The minority of road-users who use personal vehicles cannot be
allowed to hog all the road-space to the detriment of the vast majority.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

The stunning victory at the Delhi Assembly elections
of a motley group of hitherto mostly unknown people getting together to form
the Aam Aadmi Party, the common man’s party, (AAP) has shaken the very
foundations of Indian politics. With the basic manifesto of a fight against
pervasive corruption and political chicanery it emerged as the second largest
party spectacularly demolishing the ruling Indian National Congress. Having
ruled over Delhi for 15 long years the Congress took power for granted and had
become arrogant and supercilious. All that was crushed by the unexpected rout
at the hustings

Barging into the political arena with a bang the AAP
shook the established political class out of its wits. Going to the people from
door to door and mohalla to mohalla (neighbourhood to neighbourhood)
it set up a new standard of operating procedure that even the established
mainstream parties have noticed and admired. The party brought into play the
people’s choices in the democratic process. Shunning power, it even went to the
people for advice whether it should govern with support from outside of Congressmen
whom it called corrupt. With total disenchantment with the established political
set up, people opted for AAP even if with the outside support of the corrupt.

Hitherto, the people were in a democracy but were
practically out of it. They went through
the motions of electing their representatives to the legislatures for making
laws and enforce them with equity but the elected assumed the roles of the
feudal lords of yore – becoming in effect ‘rulers’ and not people’s
representatives. Over time they became a set of powerful and influential few
who appropriated for themselves perks and privileges of office at the cost of
people’s welfare. Pervasive poverty and illiteracy accompanied by the “mai-baap” (paternalistic) syndrome
helped in perpetuating the iniquitous order. No wonder, today the elected
political class has become one of the richest segments which uses power and
influence for its own advantage occasionally doling out sops to the masses.

Comfortably ensconced in their cocoon the leaders
became unaware of the ground realities. Keeping themselves away from the masses
they lost touch with the people so much so that when Rahul Gandhi, the Congress
Vice President, happened to say after the severe reverses at the hands of the
“new-kid-on-the-block” that he desired to emulate the AAP model and to “engage
with the people” it was taken as a profound statement – so profound that
sycophantic noises were made in the Party to suck up to him. The “dynastic”
party leaders, in their persistent efforts to take care of themselves, had
clean forgotten that a political party in a democracy is a mouthpiece of its
supportive people and has, therefore, to always remain “engaged” with them. In
their wheeling and dealing for power and pelf the party leaders had overlooked
the fact that they were where they were because of the people. Democracy,
plainly, had been made to stand on its head.

There is a flip side of it too. Even the people had
got used to the feudal ways of the ruling parties. Common man would never see
ministers from close quarters unless it was for a sham “mass contact” mission
the eventual result of which would be mostly a cipher. So, when Shivraj Singh
Chouhan, the third-time chief minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh, passed
by in his car with windows rolled down after his recent victory at the hustings
it became news. A photograph appeared of Chauhan peeping out of his car window
and waving at people. Today “news” is something which surprises people, being
something out of the ordinary.

It was, obviously, an extraordinary sight as even
ministers, leave alone chief ministers, of the various states in the country
are hardly ever seen with the glasses, generally heavily tinted, of their car
windows rolled down. They, especially chief ministers, travel in that Indian
symbol of power, the traditional Ambassador manufactured by Hindustan Motors
and made bullet-proof for them, accompanied by a cavalcade of several vehicles,
mostly of the SUV-type, and zip through the city streets that are blocked to
all other traffic – vehicular or pedestrian – for their quick, uninterrupted
and safe passage. People hardly ever see their faces as they keep a safe
distance from the common man.

That, after the
swearing-in ceremony, Shivraj Singh Chauhan waded into the assembled crowd in
Bhopal’s Jamboree Maidan too made the news. The newspapers duly reported the
very unusual event. It is another matter that a few decades ago on being
elected the leader of the legislative assembly the chief ministers used to be
sworn-in in the hallowed precincts of the governor’s house. Apparently, that was
not felt to be democratic enough.

The whole thing has now been taken outdoors to grounds
like the Jamboree Maidan where special arrangements are made over a period of a
week or so to provide a garishly decorated podium at considerable costs to the
public. All this is done not only for the main protagonists like the governor
and the chief minister and his ministers to be sworn-in but also for the party
bigwigs and sundry chiefs of various political parties that are considered
friendly or are potential allies in forming governments in this era of
coalitions. Several kinds of arrangements, from public address systems,
marquees to tentage, transport, refreshments and drinking water, are also made
for the foot-soldiers of the party and the people. It is apparently, a massive
public function where the main actors are confined to the podium and the people
are kept at bay, amply and securely barricaded. But, Shivraj broke that all and
hence the news item.

Sourcing of funds for this massive show of popularity
as also political strength is somewhat blurred as much

of it is covered under
the head of “security” for the governor and other political biggies. The buck,
therefore, necessarily has to stop at the public treasury.

There is an element of hypocrisy in the entire
exercise. While for most of the term the chief minister or his ministers are
hardly ever visible to the people or are hardly ever available to them, the
swearing-in to hold the public office and to uphold the Constitution is
conducted in their (people’s) rather distant presence. For most of the
five-year term they behave like maharajas of yore, keeping shut in their
bungalows or offices or bullet-proof vehicles, guarded 24-hours by
Kalashnikov-wielding commandoes and yet they try, at great public cost, to
flaunt their democratic pretensions.

The advent of the AAP is likely to change that all and
people may, henceforth, get their due importance since the raw politicos have
proved that “engaging with people” has its own dividends. Under their
substantial presence in Delhi no attempt at the usual horse-trading was made by
the BJP which missed being in power by the skin of its teeth.

AAP’s victory, therefore, is a game-changer. Indian
democracy now appears to be on the mend. Not only the hitherto apolitical
common man has participated in the political process in a big way its
representatives, the AAP, seemingly, have ushered in a new political paradigm –
an era of cleaner and people-centric politics in the country.

Friday, December 27, 2013

I don't know how many saw the report
of this rather unusual happening in the forests near Bandhavgarh

A tiger had
made a kill and had taken it into the bush. A herder who had taken buffaloes
for grazing got somewhat curious and went too close to the kill unaware of the fact that the tiger was hiding close by.
As he neared the kill the tigress pounced on him and tried to drag him into the
forest. As he screamed for help around a dozen buffaloes he had taken for
grazing gathered around and attacked the tigress forcing it to leave the
cowherd and flee. The herder escaped with minor injuries.

This is an
incident which looks like one of its kind. Even in the nature channels that I
keep watching I have seldom seen buffaloes coming to the rescue of even one of
their kind ambushed by a lion in the African wild. Here a man, grabbed by a
tigress, was rescued from literally the jaws of death by buffaloes which, kind
of, ganged up against the tiger to save their herder.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Looks like India's escalating imports of palm oil from Indonesia will see
the end of the Sumatran Tiger. While we in India would seem to be lucky in
still hosting some tigers, we, however, might well be the reason for extinction
of the tigers in Sumatra.

Despite frequent reports of tiger deaths due to poaching, negligence of
the forest staff and due to natural reasons, we still have around 1700 tigers
in our forests and their population, from all accounts, is increasing. Cubs
have been sighted in Panna Tiger Reserve which had been cleaned up by the
poachers not too long ago. Cubs have also been sighted in Ranthambore in
Rajasthan where there seems to be a problem of plenty. Tigers are reported to
have moved out of the Reserve and have been known to have migrated to the
adjoining Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh.

Although we crib and criticize every time a tiger is lost in the context
of what is happening in Indonesia, another tiger country, we are considered to
be doing rather well for conservation of the species.Our
efforts at tiger conservation are earning kudos in Indonesia. Not only the
political executives are being commended for their foresight and
farsightedness, the conservationists are being congratulated for their efforts
that have yielded positive results. Many have, therefore, suggested that
Indonesia should look westwards towards India to save the Sumatran tigers.

Down to around 300 in 1970s, the Royal Bengal Tiger has recovered in
numbers. With a far more superior way of counting, the count is now more
reliable and is pegged at 1700-odd. Not a figure to write home about
considering the vastness of the country, yet given the numerous challenges, it
is a healthy count with,

perhaps, scope of improvement. Experts have opined
that the country cannot host more than 2500 to 3000 tigers now, given the state
of its forests. As is well known, most of our tiger habitats are in dense
forests beneath which are our mineral wealth, especially coal, that great
driver of development and economic growth. These forests are, therefore, always
under threat from the mining and “development” lobbies.

Indonesia, on the other hand, is miserably down to just 400-500 of the
Sumatran tigers. Having lost Balinese subspecies 1930s and Javanese in 1970s
the only species it now has the Sumatran which is confined to a few patches of
tropical forests of the island. These remnants of the Indonesian species are
fighting a losing battle against human greed which is promoting progressive
encroachments into their habitat.

Although some reports of increase in their numbers are reported from
isolated pockets which are now conservation areas, yet their days seem to be
numbered with increasing deforestation and mushrooming oil-palm plantations.
The government, however, claims that the rate of deforestation has gone down
yet the fact remains that from the point of view of tigers it has been of
little help. They are now confined to isolated small patches of forests with no
scope for fresh genetic infusion into their small in-bred numbers putting them
under serious existential threat. As it is, the International Union for
Conservation of Nature has included it in the “critically endangered” list.

Oil palm plantations are perhaps the single largest reason for
decimation of the Sumatran species of tigers. Their profitability and
contribution to the coffers of the country have been the persistent reasons for
disappearance of the country’s once-abundant forests. More and more forests are
being cleared legally or illegally to accommodate oil palm cultivation
progressively reducing the tiger habitat. Over the last 25 years Sumatra has
lost two-thirds of its lowland forests that are the most conducive habitat for
the island’s tigers.

We in India are largely responsible for the falling numbers of the
Sumatran tigers. Two Asian biggies, China and India, are the biggest importers
of palm oil from Indonesia, India of late having overtaken China. Demand in
this country for the oil appears to be insatiable. Palm oil constitutes about
80% of the cooking oil used in India and the increasing imports at the rate of
approximately 3 to 4% per annum are fuelling deforestation and replacement of
natural forests by oil palm plantations in Indonesia in a bid to raise palm oil
production The production has now hit 50 million tonnes in 2012, India alone
having imported more than nine hundred thousand tonnes.

Used mostly as edible oil, palm oil is cheaper than other vegetable oils
and is generally consumed by the economically weaker sections of our society.
With more and more disposable income becoming available to them the demand for
palm oil has been constantly going up necessitating greater imports. A big
chunk of the oil is also used in the manufacture of cosmetics, like creams,
moisturizers, lipsticks, shampoos, etc. With rise in the number of middle
classes the consumption of cosmetics has also been going up. The multinational
cosmetic manufacturers have established manufacturing bases in the country and
their products are being aggressively promoted in the media. More than 13 to
14% of the imported palm oil is used in manufacture of these cosmetics

The trend being what it is, destruction of the tropical forests in
Indonesia is not going to stop any time soon. Perhaps, it would help if we in
India tempered down our demand for the oil. If we did that we would not

only be
saving the natural tropical forests of Indonesia, we would also be saving their
rich flora and fauna, including the Sumatran tiger.

If we have been able to save our forests and the tigers therein to a
great extent, it should not be too much to ask for measures to protect the
tigers in Indonesia. After all it is a
matter of protecting the “Global Commons” we share. Like in our case, the
forests in Sumatra will survive if their tigers survive. Tigers, with their
presence, in natural forests are a vital cog in preventing and mitigating
global warming. Let us, therefore, not invite the odium of knowingly
contributing to the extinction of the Sumatran tiger with all its undesirable
consequences.

Friday, December 13, 2013

The recent elections in Madhya Pradesh set off a
veritable ad war. In making extravagant claims of accomplishments of the
government during the last five years the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took
recourse to exaggerations and bluffs. Photographs of green farms and silky
smooth highways were picked up from the internet and passed on as achievements
of the government. Keeping a keen eye, the men of the Opposition –

MP Chief Minister Shivraj

the Indian
National Congress –pounced at the opportunity screaming that the ads of the
saffron brigade were a “collage of lies”. The Congress in the opposition has
been quite bitchy even otherwise. This was election time and it lost no time to
go all out to embarrass the party in power and unleashed a frontal attack.

That the efforts of the Congress did not yield any
result is not quite relevant. But, quite plainly, it too has been economical
with truth in making claims and promises to the people in case it happened to
wrest power from the BJP. Electioneering being virtually a war of words
everything would seem to be fair in it; lies, slander, defamation, denigration
and even vilification of the opponents are kind of par for the course. Whoever
is able to convince the voters even with lies and untruths carries the day.

At elections candidates are out to sell themselves and
they would seem to promote themselves any which way using whatever means that
delivers the desired result. When it comes to the crunch, promotion of an
individual or a product in the market is largely based on only a wee bit of
fact mixed with a hefty portion of fiction. In these days of plummeting ethics
and commercialisation of virtually everything (including votes) it is the
claims and counter claims of achievements, mostly wild, are targeted at the
audience. After all, the idea is to manipulate thinking and behaviour of the
objects of their efforts.

The Congress contestant Scindia

That is what advertising is all about. It has been
defined as a form of marketing communication “aimed to encourage, persuade or
manipulate an audience (viewers, readers, listeners; sometimes a specific
group) to take or continue to take some action.” The action desired aims at
driving consumer behaviour towards choosing the advertised ­­­object – be that
a commodity or an individual. In today’s highly competitive society truth has
virtually fallen by the wayside, more so at the market place. Manufacturing ads
in text or in audios or visuals has become an industry and the copywriters are
bright young people with an acutely imaginative mind, specialising in
communicational skills that enable conveying an idea – true or false – with as
much of brevity as possible. After all they are out to not only to persuade
people, they, in fact, wish to influence them to make the desired move or
decision. They are “creative” people selling dreams - visually and textually.

One cannot avoid their creativeness or inventiveness.
These are visible all over – in newspapers, billboards, posters, et al. They
are, however, most pervasive and, one dares say, effective on the television
which is the prime audio-visual medium today. Almost everyone has a TV set,
whether in a shanty or in a palatial house. With its great reach through the
satellites viewers in far flung parts of the country and even abroad get
exposed to the “creativeness” of these creative people. Some of them are
indifferent to their imaginative messages and some others take them – even if
misleading – as gospel truths. The gullible fall victims of these creative ads
and succumb to their claims that are mostly exaggerated and often false.

Thus one finds ads suggesting regular use of an energy
drink of malted milk enables a school-going child to get celebrated as the
“student of the year”; use of a particular brand of sanitary napkins enables a
teenage girl to top the board examinations; application of creams, lotions and
face washes lighten and whiten the skin in a jiffy; use of shampoos laced,
inter alia, with dry fruits are claimed to be anti-dandruff and prevent
hair-fall making (women’s) hair silky and lustrous; brushing teeth with a brand
of toothpaste kills germs crawling like ants all over on the gums and in the
gaps between the teeth, lending to them a sparkling white sheen; use of a
particular brand of pressure cooker imparts an amazing taste and flavour to a
dessert of grated carrot, popularly known as gaajar ka halwa and so on. The
commercial breaks every ten or fifteen minutes in half-hour slots are the
occasions when one is carpet-bombed with ads, brief stories contrived by imaginative
copywriters, generally in an effort to con the viewers into taking to the
product.

Some of the advertisers, particularly of cosmetics,
unfortunately try to exploit the weaknesses of their audience. We the non-white
people of Africa and Asia are, by and large, colour-conscious, having a
distinct weakness for fairer complexion. While some Africans crave to lighten
their skin tones, the craze is no less, for example, in Indonesia. And, in
India the classified ads section of newspapers are full of matrimonial ads that
look for only fair-complexioned brides – regardless of caste, community or
economic status. A report earlier this year was extreme in nature and somewhat
unnerving too. At an IVF clinic in India a childless woman desired a Caucasian
donor so that the child blended with her husband’s fairer family.

This craze for fairness is being exploited by
manufacturers of beauty products for which India seems to have become a
significant market. Indian manufacturers like Lakme, Himalaya and some multinationals
like Nivea, Garnier, Ponds, Vaseline, etc are in the market, aggressively
pushing their varied products. In their chase for that El Dorado of unblemished
beauty, Indian women – young or old – and, yes, even men are spending huge sums
out of their not always generous pay-packets. Seeking flawless skin with an
even tone and that elusive fairness coupled with protection from ultraviolet
rays young and old are consuming newer and newer generation of beauty lotions
and potions. The way the fairness creams are being advertised, it seems, a few
generations later Indians will overcome their brown complexion. Of late, Dove
owned by Unilever has entered the market in a big way and is trying to outdo
all others’ equally competitive products with its smooth copies and attractive
videos.

Indian women seem to have fallen lock, stock and barrel
for the beauty products so much so that currently the cosmetic market in the
country is estimated to be worth US $I.5 billion and is likely to double up to
approximately $3 billion by 2014. Hopefully, the users are aware of the risks
involved in indiscriminate use of these products purveyed by now almost a
thousand-odd manufacturers and are not taken in by their glib copies in slick
ads. According to Dr. Frank Lipmann of the Voice of Sustainable Wellness of the
US, most cosmetics and personal care products contain five major toxic
ingredients and these are “hidden” carcinogens; endocrine or hormonally
disruptive; penetration enhancers; and allergens. Unlike in the case of
tobacco, cosmetic products contain no warning although these could be
life-threatening to “the user and the foetus following maternal use and
absorption through the skin into maternal and foetal blood”

None of these
risks is ever mentioned in any of the cosmetic ads. After all, most ads are
“collages of lies”. Even Samuel Johnson found in their soul only “promise,
larger promise” and HG Wells branded them as “legalised lies”.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

The
feature “50 year ago” of The Hindu on 22nd November 2013 contained
the following report:

"Almost all the grocery shops in the city
remained closed following raids on rice, shall (?) and oil shops during the
last three days by people in certain localities in the name of consumer
resistance to high prices. As essential commodities in Calcutta and suburbs
registered over a 30% increase in the past 15 days consumers started offering
resistance in an organised manner. But this was soon followed by violent acts
due to the fact, as some traders put it, anti social elements took command of
the situation."

Rise
of only 30 % in prices had then induced an agitation verging on public
violence. Today, the retail inflation is reining far too high at or above 10%
and the prices of essentials including all edibles, from grains to oils, to
meats and vegetables, are reported to have risen within the last few months by
as much as 285%. Surprisingly, there is no stir against the steep rise in
prices. Even the working classes, which are always more vocal in protesting
against the runaway prices, have kept quiet. Those who have seen such
resistances earlier in the 1950s and 1960s would surely find this quietude and
equanimity displayed in this volatile matter by large sections of affected
people, including the under-classes, is somewhat strange.

Politicians
had been predicting since the rainy season that the prices of vegetables would
fall post-rains. The monsoons withdrew in September and at the end of November
prices of vegetables continue to rule high. Even the lowly potato that was
selling only a few days ago at Rs. 15/- a Kg has climbed on to Rs. 40/- and is
likely to climb further. With prices of onions and potatoes, the two staples,
going through the roof life ought to have become difficult for the economically
weaker sections. But there is no whiff of any resistance. Everybody seems to be
taking the whole thing in stride.

There
seem to be two possibilities for the absence of any stir in this regard. Either
the general population has come to the conclusion that there wouldn’t be any
point in kicking up a row about the unconscionable rise in the cost of living
as, at least for the present, there is just no government in the country, the
politicians being all busy electioneering. Or, as Manmohan Singh’s government
claims, with its social sector spending the under-classes have now substantial
incomes that have boosted demands all around in rural and urban areas pushing
up all the prices. They would, therefore, hardly hany reason to complain. Which
of the two factors is working is difficult to fathom. It could be one of them
or both. But one finds it rather strange that despite an unacceptable level of
retail inflation there is an unseemly and an uncharacteristic quietude all over
the country, as if all is well with it. Have our countrymen become richer?

The
Centre does not seem to be bothered either. That this unsustainable high level
of inflation has a deleterious effect on the country’s economy impacting its
fiscal position and weakening its currency does not seem to attract their
attention. No measure to counter the runaway inflation has been taken or
announced and the government seems to be playing for time till the elections next
year. In the meantime, regardless of the pervasive tranquility, the hoarders
and middlemen in the wholesale markets of grains and vegetables are making
merry – suckering up the farmers and cheating the consumers. It would be silly politicians
to touch them as some of them, if not most, could well be the financiers of
prospective contestants at the hustings.

Looks
like, people are going to be stuck with the high prices of various commodities
for quite some time in the future. They are unlikely to come down even after
the elections as no politician, much less the food minister, seems to be keen
on taming them.

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About Me

There would seem to be no point in talking about the position I used to hold. What is more relevant today is that I am retired from the service of government of India where I worked for thirty four years in senior positions ending just below the top of my department. I retired more than twenty years ago. To be fruitfully engaged I took to blogging and writing articles, initially, on local issues but now for years I have been writing on topical and environmental matters. The writings in the local supplement of a national daily gave me some kind of a positive identity in the town which culminated in my being nominated to be a founder member of Bhopal Citizens' Forum, a powerful pressure group. I am , I think, fruitfully engaged and I have no complaints against life.